Saturday 24 February 2018

.Reasons for nationalisation`s popularity

Your Leader column (16th February,2018) attributed the current popularity of nationalisation to the electorate being "weary of substandard service", particularly on the railways, and the "excessive prices imposed by many private companies". What it omitted was the repugnance aroused by obscenely high levels of pay awarded to CEOs of private companies, resulting in increased pay ratios; in 2016, for every £1 the average employee of a FTSE company was paid, their CEO received £129. To make matters worse, the CEO`s pay is often unjustly awarded, either after making "efficiency" savings, by closing branches and sacking workers, or after initiating short-termist policies, which see share values increase but little or no investment in technology and training to improve productivity.
       There is also the issue of awareness; the British public know not only, as the Leader said, how the "state across Europe plays an indispensable role in ownership and strategy", but how nationalised foreign companies profit from their involvement in British transport and energy. Having a Tory government which refuses to contemplate state control, but allows British companies to be run by foreign states is plainly idiotic, and has to stop.
       Nationalising railways and utilities would allow pay ratios to be improved, and set an example for all private companies. Failure by many to follow suit would then provide moral justification, if any was needed, for Labour`s aim to tax high earners more heavily, with a 60% rate surely not out of the question; under Margaret Thatcher`s government, the top income tax rate was at that level until the 1988 budget! 

Friday 23 February 2018

Helen Lewis`s Memory

Fourteen years since becoming "politically active", and Helen Lewis has never felt "more despairing about the quality of our politicians" (Out of the Ordinary, 16th February, 2018). Of all the Tory ministers, she is only able to point to Gove, whose weekly announcements on environmental issues apparently make him "a pocket of industry", whilst from Labour, only McDonnell and his advisers are praised for "thinking about new ways" to create a fairer economic model.
Lewis`s memory is clearly playing tricks! How can she forget Cameron`s administrations, which feigned compassion, and forged instead callous and unnecessary austerity polices aimed at the most unfortunate in our society? What about the "omnishambles" Osborne made of most of his budgets, failing to meet his own targets and losing the AAA credit rating, not to mention the reduction of taxes on the rich in times of increasing inequality, and the deliberate underfunding of health, caring and education? Gove took education back years to Gradgrindian rote-learning and GCSEs based on memory rather than analysis, whilst May introduced a billboard campaign, telling illegal immigrants to "go home or face arrest". Then there were the increases in academisation, privatisation, Rachmanism, "Fat-catism", food banks, phone-hacking and arms sales to the Saudis.
In any "despair league" of recent political action, that takes some beating!

Friday 16 February 2018

A "Beatlesong" response to Quincy

Quincy Jones, please (Beatles "worst musicians in the world", says Quincy Jones, 08/02/18)! Please me and all Guardian readers by refraining from such nonsense; there`s a place for it, but not in this tabloid. "Worst musicians", as If. I fell for that before but not a second time. Lennon said Ringo wasn`t the best drummer in the Beatles, because the end of the group was near, so let`s try writing something about things getting better for a change. Don`t ask me why but ending misery doesn`t always require a revolution!

Wednesday 14 February 2018

1833 Abolition a "factoid"

David Olusoga rightly criticises the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833, both for its obscene generosity of £20m, "the modern equivalent of £17bn", granted as compensation to slave owners "for the loss of their human property", and for the lack of accuracy which surrounds it. It did not free all slaves in the empire as the countless school text books insist, because well into the 20th century, slavery was still in existence in Sierra Leone, Gambia, Burma, Hong Kong and northern Nigeria, a fact Britain confessed to the League of Nations in 1924.
   Glorifying Britain`s role in the past is typical of the manipulation of our history which has been going on over centuries, and the Abolition Act must be seen alongside other such mythologised "facts" as the "fair governance" of our colonies and "Britain alone" in 1940! It`s a shame that the all too numerous "factoids" in the history books cannot be deleted as easily as the Treasury`s tweet!

Tuesday 13 February 2018

Snobbery of elite universities

Politicians are very keen to blame teachers for failing to inspire pupils with sufficient aspiration and confidence to persuade them to apply to Oxbridge and other so-called "elite" universities, and less enthusiastic about criticising the universities themselves for creating a self-reinforcing spiral. Of course, governments have to accept responsibility for underfunding schools and closing Sure-Start centres, and even for refusing to contemplate passing legislation banning universities from exceeding the 7% national level with students from public schools, but universities have the means to improve social mobility at a stroke, and refuse to do it.
   David Lammy, back in October last year, revealed how both Oxford and Cambridge, recipients of over £800m of taxpayers` money each year, enrol consistently around 80% of their intake from the top two social classes, with more offers being made to pupils from Eton than to students on free school meals across the whole country. Totally unsurprisingly, the number of ethnic minority students accepted is so low, Lammy concluded there has to be "systematic bias"!
      And still the universities make excuses. A recent article in the Guardian by  professor Wolff from Oxford university claimed that "playing safe" with undergraduate admissions, in other words giving preference to applicants from upper middle class homes, was encouraged by the government`s Teaching Excellence Framework. This includes students` drop-out rates as a measurement of a university`s success, but has been in existence for under two years, and is the most feeble of reasons for explaining decades of the lack of diversity in our "top" universities.
   It clearly does not explain why students with straight As from an economically poor area in the north of England stand far less chance of being accepted by one of the Russell group universities than does someone with similar grades from a public school. According to Lammy`s research, Oxford, for example, makes more offers to applicants from five of the home counties than to the whole of the north of England.
   How similar are those qualifying grades anyway? Do universities check whether the grades have been achieved through traditional A-levels, or whether students have taken the Pre-U examinations, popular in most public schools, where there is the possibility that the exam papers were either set or marked by their teachers. A cheating scandal was exposed involving these examinations last summer, resulting in a pathetic "investigation" by the Commons education select committee. If these examinations, not inspected and regulated by the Joint Council for Qualifications like all the other examinations taken by sixth-formers, and run, incidentally by Cambridge Assessment International, part of Cambridge university, are not chosen because of the extra advantage they afford, what is the reason?
         Where is the "risk", anyway, in offering a place to a student from a school in an economically-deprived area, who achieves grade Bs and Cs in traditional A-level examinations, and who clearly has the potential to attain an excellent degree? He or she may lack, unsurprisingly, confidence, and may not perform well in a nerve-racking interview, which has a reputation for belittling applicants with local dialects and who are unable to recite any of Byron`s poetry, but has real talent and potential to improve further. Research by Cardiff and Oxford Brookes universities proved students from state schools gain better degrees than independently-educated candidates with the same A-level grades.
       There is only one reason the so-called "elite" universities recruit so many undergraduates from schools in the private sector, when nationally only 7% pupils attend them - academic snobbery. A Labour government should consider legislation, both to force these universities to open their doors much wider, and to insist all university qualifications in the UK are gained through properly regulated examinations.

Sunday 11 February 2018

Undemocratic Tories

Tories frequently claim to be the upholders of the "British" value that is democracy, yet what they are currently doing, and which Andrew Rawnsley omitted to mention in his piece on their most recent crisis, is totally undemocratic (Taking their knives to Mrs May`s toga won`t solve all of the Tories` troubles,04.02.18). It`s not so much that the "Tory party fears that any replacement would likely to be worse", but that an unelected leader would almost certainly be forced to go to the polls, and that would allow democracy to bring in Labour to form a government. Refusing to sack May in case it lets in Corbyn is both undemocratic and morally repugnant!
       Rawnsley was right about May being a "zombie prime minister", bungling the "few opportunities to revive her authority", and using a cabinet reshuffle to suppress the progress of any "future leadership material", but it was her misuse of the honours system which epitomised May`s selfish pursuit of "her own short-term needs". Awarding knighthoods to both the chair and treasurer of the "kingmaking" 1922 Committee, and making its vice-chair a dame, really did reveal that the prime minister is far more concerned about her own position than the state of the party, let alone the country!
 Any decent MPs in the Tory party would be plotting to overthrow May, not because of her lack of "vision" and clarity over Brexit, but because of her abuse of prime ministerial powers. The fact is that, under her leadership, the innumerable crises over health, education and safety not only have increased rather than declined but also show no signs of having been dealt with. This does not seem to bother Tories at all, and that speaks volumes!

Friday 9 February 2018

Clueless about the future? And the past!

Gary Younge rightly states that the country`s cluelessness "about the future" results from a distorted view of our history (The delusions of war and empire that led to Brexit, 03/02/18). The refusal to study the past in any detail, allied to successive governments` insistence on manipulating our history by hiding away vital evidence in Hanslope Park, results in arrogant delusion, the ensuing feeble attempts to punch above our weight in the Brexit negotiations, and the inevitable and humiliating climbdowns. Exaggerating differences with our neighbours, and pretending to own what Martin Kettle recently called a "tradition of exceptionalism", has led to the ridiculous and parlous situation in which the country now finds itself (Protestantism is on the wane, yet the Reformation sowed the seeds of Brexit, 27/10/17). The deliberately misremembered historical chickens have most certainly come home to roost.
  It is noticeable that the countries, like Germany, which have faced up to their difficult pasts, appear more aware of the need for unity in Europe. Only when the truth about the UK`s colonial past is revealed, when the facts about our seizing and looting of colonies, whilst committing the most awful of atrocities, and our reliance on essential colonial aid to emerge successfully from world wars, are all openly admitted, can the people and government of this country ever hope to have a non-distorted view of the future. The idea that our isolation in the past was "splendid" is part of the historical mythology driving current government policy.

Truss and Osborne up to usual tricks!

Few will have been taken by surprise by the "hellfire" of Liz Truss`s "logic" (Two data points of nonsense? This Tory has been hacked, 01/02/18). Her ridiculous attack on Momentum members this week was hardly unexpected following her co-authorship of "Britannia Unchained" in 2012. Who can forget this treatise`s claim that British workers "are among the worst idlers in the world"? Let`s hope the voters in South-West Norfolk don`t!

Osborne is right to say there is a north-south split in education; it`s the gap in school funding which he more than anyone was responsible for creating  (GCSE results of poor pupils in north worst in England, 01/02/18)! Not only did his austerity cuts to northern councils` budgets mean the shutting of hundreds of Sure-Start centres, but his profligacy with spending on free schools meant unnecessary diversion of much-needed funds away from state schools. Is it surprising that northern children achieve "GCSE grades that are significantly worse than those of their counterparts in London", when primary schools in the north receive £900 per pupil less than the ones in London, and secondary schools £1300 less? The small matter of investment gap between everywhere in the UK and the south-east, again his creation, also contributes strongly to the teaching recruitment crisis, which is most evident in northern areas.
   The arrogance of the former chancellor clearly knows no bounds. He even had the audacity to claim on Radio 4`s Today programme that the success of the London Challenge was due to his financial management, the Tories` academisation policy, and Gove`s curriculum reforms! Next he`ll be trying to get us to believe that his Northern Powerhouse idea wasn`t an election wheeze dreamt up weeks before the 2015 election, when the Tories were behind in the polls!

NS letter on European Research Group

Albeit only taking up one column in Peter Wilby`s First Thoughts, a semblance of much needed political balance was offered in last week`s edition (2nd February, 2018). Revealing some truths about the secretive and somewhat "sinister" European Research Group to counter the huge barrage of criticism showered on Momentum by the right-wing Mail and Murdoch press, was good to read. Despite being funded by thousands of pounds of taxpayers` money, via Tory MPs` expenses, this organisation, which Wilby rightly describes as a "party faction", refuses to disclose its membership for public scrutiny. Yet it`s the transparent Momentum which takes the media`s flak, with the so-called "non-partisan" BBC as guilty as the others; Sunday`s 8 o`clock news on Radio 4 was followed by a brief look at the papers, and the first four items were focused on anti-Momentum and Corbyn stories!
   Hopefully the NS will step up its efforts, both to give Corbyn`s Labour a fairer hearing, and to challenge the Tories on their lack of transparency. It`s not only the ERG which is being secretive. The taxpayers of this country deserve to know the tax details of the Mays, and of the entire Tory cabinet!

Thursday 8 February 2018

"Slimeballism" - a Tory trait!

Whilst Jeremy Corbyn prime-ministerially described the President`s Club "grope-fest" as "an outrageous example of sexual harrassment under the guise of a charity event" (Morning Star, 24/01/18), I actually preferred (possibly the one and only time I will ever agree with her) the description by Tory MP, Margot James. Her criticism of the dinner as an evening for "slimeballs" was spot-on. What does surprise me, however, is why she doesn`t use the term more often, as it particularly well describes her fellow Tory MPs in the Commons.
The dictionary definition of a "slimeball" is a "repulsive or despicable person", very fitting for people who have deliberately aimed to hurt the less fortunate in society, as Tory austerity policies have done. Even worse when it is done whilst conning voters into believing the cuts were vital to reduce the country`s debt, but ignoring all opportunities to impose tax increases on the rich! Someone who sets out purposely to make life more difficult for disabled people is an absolute slimeball - no question. So is the person who votes against all rented homes being "fit for habitation", which is what 309 of them did two years ago. How you would describe the 72 of them who are actually landlords themselves is probably not printable!
      Then there are the ones who bray like constipated hyenas every time Corbyn stands up in parliament to defend the NHS, or attack the corporate behaviour of greedy CEOs running down pension funds whilst taking massive pay increases for themselves. Naturally such awful behaviour in the boardroom leads to similarly disgusting activities in their clubs.

     Is there not room in Labour`s next manifesto for a pledge to legislate, banning the existence of all male-only establishments, whether they be for golfers or gropers! It appears that the prerequisite for membership in all of these places is "slimeballism"!

Sunday 4 February 2018

NS letter on old Labour misremembering

Whilst agreeing with Joe Haines (Correspondence, 26th January, 2018) that the Tories` "powers of recovery" should never be underestimated, and that the New Statesman "has a powerful influence" on political life, it is abundantly clear that your journal must support "the election of a Corbyn government". With the country being governed, as your Leader states (26th January), by "one of the most politically and intellectually rudderless administrations in recent history", that support increasingly becomes a duty.
 With the Tories` persevering with unnecessary austerity policies, the shameful underfunding of the NHS and schools, and a stubborn refusal to tax the wealthy and provide adequate housing, Corbyn`s Labour is promising what the country clearly needs. Haines appears worried by the pledges on nationalisation, and what he calls "heavy taxation and dangerous borrowing"; he even warns against "falling living standards". Has he not heard about the fall in real wages since 2008, decreased life expectancy in some areas, rogue landlordism and the massive increase in homelessness, not to mention the extremely low interest rates for government borrowing? Indeed, has he forgotten that under Wilson in the 1970s income tax reached 83% for earnings, with an extra 15% for investment income? Or that the industries nationalised then included railways, coal, steel, airways and airports, gas, electricity, telecoms and water? Did Haines write to protest then?
    Of course, the New Statesman is right to disagree with some of Labour`s policies, and even suggest alternatives, but it is crucial it accepts that a moderate centre-left party cannot defeat the Tories in the next election. The country requires a government willing to transform, not tinker!

University entrance qualifications

It is an absolute disgrace that some of Britain`s "most prestigious universities" are failing to recognise "vocational qualifications" like BTecs (Elite universities "snub student BTecs", 28.01.18).How can the country ever aspire to any sort of social mobility existing when universities create yet another barrier in the way of poorer students being accepted into the so-called "top" universities.
       What these universities should be doing, however, is to insist that all the A-level qualifications have been achieved in the same way, by studying courses with teachers who do not set the examination questions, or mark the finished papers. This is not the case in many public schools, where the Pre-U examinations are taken. It was only when the cheating  scandal broke last summer that these examinations surfaced, and when the education select committee questioned the head of Eton, it was revealed that seven of his current staff were involved in setting Pre-U examination questions, and marking papers, which Eton`s pupils were taking instead of traditional A-levels. A teacher who knows the questions in advance does not need to share them with the pupils to be giving them an unfair advantage; that will come from the emphasis in the teaching.
  Not only is the existence of this alternative route into university totally unfair, the fact that the examinations are run by Cambridge Assessment International Education, which is not only part of Cambridge University, but also is not a member of the Joint Council for Qualifications, the body responsible for examination regulation and inspection, casts huge doubt on the  integrity of Pre-U exams.
     Not only are these universities making it more difficult for students from "white working class or ethnic minority families" to be accepted, they also, it seems, are making it easier for pupils in the private sector, by accepting these dubious examinations as valid qualifications for university entrance.